Beavers

Children in our area often see beavers and their dams in our local rivers. We created this 15 Minute Circle Time to help them learn more about them.

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Attention Getter: What Do You Know About Beavers?

Before class, create a board that asks basic beaver questions and has beaver pictures and facts ready. (See the slideshow below for the pictures and facts we created.)

When children arrive use a beaver puppet https://www.folkmanis.com/prod-154-1-46-1/beaver.htm to welcome the children and to ask them what they know about beavers! Then, let one child at a time come up and pull off a paper so you can read and discuss the interesting beaver facts.

Scroll through the slideshow to see the various facts that were shared about beavers.

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Activity 1: Beaver Dams

Show the children pictures of beaver dens and habitats. Review the process of building a beaver dam by laying out a long piece of blue material to represent a river. Share how beavers have to decide where to build their den. When they build their dam a larger pond of water is created. (See pictures below)

We glued 3 small boxes together to represent the 3 rooms of a beaver den. Then we covered the outside with fabric, twigs, and rocks to represent materials used for a beaver dam.

We laid out a long piece of blue fabric to represent a river.

Then we showed how the beaver would choose a place on the river to build a dam.

We then placed a round piece of material above the dam to show how the dam creates bigger ponds.

If time, show the children the PBS Video that describes how beavers build dams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJjaQExOPPY . Have the following questions written on the board and ask the children to see if they can find the answers by watching the video.

What do beavers eat?

How do beavers cut trees?

What colors are beavers’ teeth?

How do beavers make dams?

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Book: The Beavers' Busy Year

This book provides many details about beavers. Show and discuss the pages that you feel are most interesting to your class.

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Activity 2: What's Inside a Beaver Dam?

Show the children the three rooms that are inside a beaver den you used in Activity 1. Tell them that beavers build three special rooms in their houses, much like they have different rooms in their houses. Show one picture at a time and tell about it: the eating chamber is where they eat, the sleeping chamber is where they sleep and the nursery is where the babies are born and cared for. Then place each picture in a separate section of the beaver den.

Did you know that beaver dens have 3 rooms? Neither did we until we created this unit. We found that fascinating and so did the children.